This dissertation investigates on-going language variation and change in Abui, a Timor-Alor-Pantar (Papuan) language spoken on the island of Alor, eastern Indonesia. Like many indigenous languages... Show moreThis dissertation investigates on-going language variation and change in Abui, a Timor-Alor-Pantar (Papuan) language spoken on the island of Alor, eastern Indonesia. Like many indigenous languages spoken on Alor, Abui has been in intensive contact with Alor Malay, the regional lingua franca, for around 50-60 years. This has had the greatest impact on younger speakers, who are now being raised in Alor Malay and only learn Abui during or after adolescence. Drawing on methods from descriptive linguistics, bilingualism research, and variationist sociolinguistics, the Abui of four different age-groups was found to vary significantly, suggesting that this shift to Alor Malay is having an impact on Abui.This was illustrated using three case-studies of language variation and change, examining reflexive possessive marking, verb usage, and reduplication. Broadly speaking, it was found that the 50-60 years of intense contact between Alor Malay and Abui has led to the simplification of Abui grammar. In particular, the reflexivity distinction in possession is becoming neutralized, certain verbs are taking over others and becoming more generic, while reduplication is becoming more productive and more Malay-like in function and form. These outcomes are argued to be a case of both incomplete acquisition and transfer.This dissertation may prove of relevance to anyone interested in the study of language contact and change, bilingualism, sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics, endangered languages, Papuan and Austronesian languages, and language variation in minority languages. Show less
This thesis explores the influence of prescriptivism on language use in American English. It does so by studying the relationship between language advice literature, patterns of language use,... Show moreThis thesis explores the influence of prescriptivism on language use in American English. It does so by studying the relationship between language advice literature, patterns of language use, and speakers’ attitudes. The thesis shows that the genre of usage guides, routinely associated with prescriptivism, is undergoing change to reflect processes of change in progress in American English. Furthermore, prescriptivism and language use are shown to mutually influence each other. Show less
This dissertation provides new insights into language variation and change in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Dutch. More specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent... Show moreThis dissertation provides new insights into language variation and change in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Dutch. More specifically, it investigates whether and to what extent official language policy measures exerted influence on actual language practice.During the nation-building period around 1800, the Northern Netherlands witnessed the introduction of a national language policy, which aimed at the spread of a homogeneous written standard variety of Dutch, symbolising 'the' nation. In concrete terms, these top-down endeavours resulted in the first official codification of the Dutch orthography (Siegenbeek 1804) and grammar (Weiland 1805). Despite marking a decisive turning point in the standardisation history of Dutch, the effectiveness of the so-called schrijftaalregeling 'written language regulation' has never been investigated empirically.Taking a historical-sociolinguistic approach, this dissertation aims to fill this research gap by examining the impact of language policy on patterns of variation and change. How successful was the schrijftaalregeling in disseminating the officialised norms across the population at large, as envisaged by the government? Making use of the newly compiled Going Dutch Corpus, a diachronic multi-genre corpus comprising more than 420,000 words of authentic usage data (private letters, diaries and travelogues, newspapers), a wide range of orthographic and morphosyntactic features is analysed. Show less
The Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the... Show moreThe Italian ‘mobile diphthongs’ sheds light on the complexity of one of the salient analogical changes that occurred in the Italian language, viz. the elimination of the alternation between the stressed diphthongs [jE] and [wO] and the unstressed monophthongs [e] and [o], respectively, within a limited group of inflectional and derivational paradigms. Historically, the monophthong–diphthong alternation was the consequence of a pan-Romance diphthongization process that affected the Late Latin low mid vowels in stressed positions. The relatively recent levelling of this alternation has led to a great deal of variation: in some cases the alternations are maintained while in others they have been eliminated. The first aim of the present study was to scrutinize durational aspects of Italian diphthongs and monophthongs in general. The second aim was to examine to what extent the variation caused by analogical levelling of the monophthong–diphthong alternation, attested in written sources, also occurs in the spoken language. To investigate these issues, a series of production experiments was carried out with native speakers of Italian. The final aim was to provide a coherent phonological treatment of the insights provided by the experiments within the framework of Optimality Theory.The book is intended as a contribution to experimental phonetics and phonology. It introduces an exciting tool for language-variation research, the speech-shadowing technique, and discusses recent phonological approaches to phenomena such as glide formation, analogy and paradigm uniformity. Therefore, this study is of interest to both phoneticians and phonologists, as well as to linguists with a special interest in Italian. Show less
